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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#231

Post by coldtea »

jrimbault wrote: post #88
Miraste wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is widely used for a staggering array of tasks. Is it? What area are you in? In my hobbyist, college, and industry experience I've never seen anyone use emacs for anything. I have seen Vim (or at least vim bindings) a few times, but I only know of emacs from older unix discussions online. Edit: Looking through stack overflow developer surveys, emacs use is in 16th place for editor popularity at ~4.5% usage, but…

Just to add links to the SO surveys mentionned here : - 2019: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e... - 2018: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#development-e... - 2017: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-_-... - 2016: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016#technology-de... - 2015: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015#tech-editor What's real…

The huge advantage of VSC: plugins can use HTML to implement whatever UI they want, from a workflow tool, to a test tool, to a Git graph view to a debugger data structure visualizer. And all that in widely-known to tons of people HTML/CSS.

Never understood why other editors, like ST, didn't give more UI options (checkboxes, buttons, dropdowns, a canvas, etc) to plugin authors. Consider how clunky a lot of plugin interactions with limited UI widgets available to them are.

But even if other editors started giving more freedom to design your plugin with more widgets etc, they could never beat the freedom HTML/CSS gives.

The second huge advantage of VSC: Microsoft behind it updating it non-stop. TextMate stalled, ST seems abandoned for long stretches of time (and it's not like we "already solved code-editing, what more you want") because of lack of manpower, etc.

The third advantage of VSC: first-class support for plugins, with "package manager" and storage built-in: plugin discovery, install, uninstall, enable/disable, configure, are all a click away. ST has this too, but not as refined as VSC, but more like a tacked-on text-based experience.

Two more advantages of VSC:

- remote development tools (MS). Code in your laptop, run/debug in SSH/Docker/WSL environment.

- automatically saved/synced preferences. This came in in this release.

I'm not in favor of Electron apps over native. But VSC is really that good.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#232

Post by schwartzworld »

xapata wrote: post #214
schwartzworld wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JS development in IntelliJ/WebStorm is an amazing experience. The refactoring features alone make it easy to write code without worrying about details like "where does the file go" or "what should I name this". You can get the code working and rename / move code with a single click later on, knowing the refactor will propagate through the app. The intellisense is amazing too. Start typing a method name and you see ar…

I've heard people say that, but what I find is that they pick shitty names and never refactor. I'm on a different team now. Most of us use vim.

Yeah, but then when someone tells you in code review to pick a less shitty variable name, it still takes one click.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#233

Post by DoctorOetker »

BeetleB wrote: post #113
im3w1l wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nicely formatted math. Gui designers. Diagrams. And personally I find tabs is the most efficient design for switching between files.

> Nicely formatted math. Can you elaborate? With a keystroke, it renders a LaTeX formula inline.

this could sway me, as a novice, whats the mininum amount of steps (from necessary packages to install to actual inline math output o screen) to demonstrate this?

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#234

Post by eska »

> many (young) people seem to spend most of their time watching videos (as in, watching videos is their equivalent to my being idle). But admittedly, those videos usually last 10s or so (and if not, they switch to the next video anyway), so we'd have to use very short videos, ideally funny and sexy, maybe with a cat?

If I ever say anything like this in a UX discussion, please just shoot me that instant. This person's arrogance makes me shiver.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#235

Post by snazz »

fmakunbound wrote: post #112
xrd wrote: post #39

I've been an emacs user for more than 20 years. Is it just me, or is this article completely missing the point? I've switched to VS Code because I can install extensions so easily. Getting a theme installed is not my concern at all. With emacs, I'm still never sure how to get elpa (or why not melpa) to work correctly. And, modern packages for react never seem to be available there anyway. I'm still astounded package…

What’s extending VS Code like compared to Emacs?

The amazing thing about Emacs is that you can run a snippet of elisp from anywhere at any time. I never found this to be a major advantage of Emacs for my own workflow, but if it matters to you, editors like VS Code won't cut it.

The more structured approach to building extensions in VS Code prevents namespace issues and improves robustness at the cost of runtime flexibility.

I occasionally use the Python console in Sublime Text to achieve the same thing as the Emacs scratch buffer, but Sublime also has more structured plugins than Emacs. I guess it's also technically possible to pop open the JavaScript console in VS Code, but I don't think that's recommended or very productive.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#237

Post by xapata »

schwartzworld wrote: post #232
xapata wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard people say that, but what I find is that they pick shitty names and never refactor. I'm on a different team now. Most of us use vim.

Yeah, but then when someone tells you in code review to pick a less shitty variable name, it still takes one click.

Sadly, when you get a reputation for giving that feedback, people stop asking you to review.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#238

Post by wenc »

rcconf wrote: post #56

After using Emacs for 10+ years, I've switched to VSCode for a really simple reason: fuzzy matching a file in a project. I've tried so many different plugins and hacks to get it to work, but it never did quite work. Searching for a filename either matches the wrong file, or new files that were freshly added are no longer there.

Wow so many people are switching to VS Code...

I’ve been a vim user for 22 years and I switched over to VS Code last year but only for development. I have to grudgingly admit that it’s just a more productive environment. I do like VS Code.

I still edit config files etc with vim though.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#239

Post by agumonkey »

Miraste wrote: post #64
mapgrep wrote: post #28

I don’t know. I read the whole article and it seems the suggestions boil down to emacs needing to be more “modern” by defaulting to dark mode, making color theming easier, changing right click behavior, the menus, and changing the shortcuts. And the author of the article would like the development process to be more “modern.” Emacs is one of the most successful text editors of all time if not the most successful. It…

> It is widely used for a staggering array of tasks. Is it? What area are you in? In my hobbyist, college, and industry experience I've never seen anyone use emacs for anything. I have seen Vim (or at least vim bindings) a few times, but I only know of emacs from older unix discussions online. Edit: Looking through stack overflow developer surveys, emacs use is in 16th place for editor popularity at ~4.5% usage, but…

but how is % usage related to tasks ?

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#240

Post by gen220 »

symlinkk wrote: post #229
gen220 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a vim user, but I imagine there’s a similar way to do this in emacs... The secret is piping fd into fzf and opening the selected value from fzf. You can probably write a 2-liner in elisp that shells out. In my experience, this pipeline provides a faster and better matching experience than any IDE. Once I got this working, I never went back to VS Code. :)

If it’s so simple why don’t they build it into emacs?

Not sure if this was asked sincerely, but fzf is a fairly new program, relative to emacs.
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